Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”. This week I want to share with you some reflections about faculty development in times of pandemic and beyond. I have been invited by EDEN (European Distance and E-learning Network) to participate in a webinar exploring the challenges we are likely to encounter in the next phase of teaching and learning online. I will discuss about various approaches of faculty development and support and how to build on what has already been created in the past months. You can read my thoughts below and join the webinar on Monday, 28 September, 17:00 CEST by registering here. Looking forward to your comments and ideas! Have a nice weekend!
The past six months have challenged many existing assumptions and routines regarding how we teach, how students learn, the role of educators and the learning spaces we are using. It is too early to tell if this disruption will have a long-lasting impact and will result in transformation at institutional level. But a lot of efforts have been put into making sure the move to online teaching goes as smoothly as possible, first in the emergency phase and then in a more consistent manner throughout the summer, in preparation for a new academic year full of uncertainties.
Now is a good moment to reflect on faculty development as well as support structures in times of pandemic and beyond. Given the lack of a coherent and comprehensive pedagogical education approach in Higher Education, it’s important to take stock of and evaluate the efforts made in the past months and try to build on the resources and new routines that have been developed.
Who is involved?
Faculty development and support is a very diverse topic and universities have established different types of structures to address the existing needs. Not only does the amount of human and financial resources allocated for this purpose differ largely, the way faculty development and support is organised is also very context-specific. Some universities have dedicated Teaching and Learning Centres, while some others take a more decentralised approach, leaving it to faculty or department level. In some cases the teams specialised in digital education are part of these Centres, in other cases they belong to the central information services.
From being an often neglected “nice to have”, digital education/ educational technology teams have become overnight the main providers of faculty support and training. Learning designers, learning technologists, e-learning or distance learning specialists (and the list can continue) have worked tirelessly throughout the spring and summer to support academic staff. It was interesting to see new routines developing: whereas previously faculty would approach their teaching as a purely individual task, everyone is starting to acknowledge that team work (including non-academic staff) has its benefits.
Moreover, there has been a great amount of quality open resources created and exchanged through existing and new networks, which helped educators thoughout the world and especially those working at universities where expertise and support on digital education was missing.
What has been done?
If I were to define the various approaches taken by universities in the past months to support their academic staff, I would probably say it is a mix of reactive and proactive, general and discipline-specific, pedagogy and technology- focused. Less coordinated at first, and more streamelined (although not everywhere), later on.
Here are some of the approaches used to engage and support faculty (this is by no means an exhausive list):
Self-paced online courses, usually set up on the institutional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)- to model student experience, including a wealth of information and resources on various topics realated to teaching online, from course design to managing interactions. Faculty has the opportunity to go through the course at their own pace and focus on their points of interest.
Bespoke live sessions at departmental/ faculty level, to complement the existing resources and offer staff a chance to ask more specific questions; also used to showcase different tools or learning design topics. Some of these sessions tackle discipline-specific aspects of online teaching and learning.
Regular drop-in sessions- a more flexible approach allowing faculty come with their own questions and receive advice and hands-on support from learning designers and learning technologists.
Repositories of resources/ media centres on how to use various tools and platforms- both from a pedagogical and a functional perspective.
Challenges
While these rapid faculty development methods have proved effective, some challenges and limitations have become clear:
The risk of cognitive overload: Faculty has become overwhelmed with the amount of infomation and the number and variety of tools available. All this is difficult to proces and implement in a short period of time.
The need to find a balance between theory and practice: This involes finding a middle way between satisfying faculty demands for immediately applicable solutions (“silver bullets”) and the efforts to provide pedagogically sound advice that can help them design their courses in the future.
The reflex of faculty to favour synchronous interaction: The main challenge here is to shift the existing perception that learning can only happen with everyone present in one room, by offering alternative ways to effectively engage students in an asynchronous environment.
The greater demand for technical rather than padagogical guidance: While technology is the new element in the equation, it cannot be totally disentangled from its pedagogical use. Refocusing on how they teach makes choosing the technology tools easier and more intuitive for faculty.
The way forward?
As we are currently looking at an academic year where at least a large part of the teaching and learning will take place online, how can we refine the current catalogue of faculty development methods so that we can provide effective and targeted support? Here are some ideas:
Trying to showcase good practice in the coming months. Research suggests that learning from peers is one of the most effective ways to learn. Facilitating an exchange of case studies, examples and ideas could be a great way to complement the large amount of resources already provided. It does not have to be only stories of success; talking about things that did not work can be as effective.
Encouraging peer review and observation. This is playing on academic staff’s existing routine of peer reviewing each other’s research. Teaching is often considered a lonely endeavour, but it does not have to be like this. Especially when it comes to teaching online, which is new for many, peer observation could lead to a lot of useful insights, both on more conceptual and more practical details. Sharing course design/ syllabus or providing access to one’s course are a few ways to facilitate peer review for online teaching.
Designing “Essentials” information guides: they should be brief (1–2 pages or 2-3 minute videos) and targeted to specific topics, to avoid cognitive overload. They can be offered using various media: text, short videos, podcasts to make them as accessible as possible. This approach gives faculty the opportunity to “mix and match” resources according to their needs.
What these approaches have in common is the idea of going beyond information transmission and trying to create and sustain a community of practice. This includes academics, educational developers, IT professionals and, let’s not forget, students. The great thing is that technology can help open up the institutional bubbles and enable global exchanges.
Thinking ahead, beyond the pandemic, we need to find ways to build on the resources and social capital already created in order to design coherent faculty development offers, both on online and face-to-face learning and teaching.